It’s been about a month since Yahoo! acquired FoxyTunes.  Usually it takes time to integrate companies after an acquisition, but it seems like FoxyTunes isn’t wasting any time to push new features.  The company has officially released FoxyTunes 2.0 according to the Yahoo! Blog.

In addition to FoxyTunes features to control music through a toolbar on a web browser, FoxyTunes 2.0 for Internet Explorer now has a Mini Desktop widget that can connect to it.

The skinny on FoxyTunes is that they also have custom skins.  There are 11 total available as of right now.  Since FoxyTunes has new skin colors, what better way to show that they’re univesal than by supporting different languages.

FoxyTunes 2.0 for Internet Explorer also has 30 new languages connected.  This includes Bulgarian, Czech, German, and Spanish.  FoxyTunes created a Firefox 3 compatible plugin for Mozilla’s upcoming release.

And lastly, FoxyTunes now supports timer and alarm clock features in Internet Explorer.  Beforehand, this feature was only possible using the FoxyTunes plugin for Firefox.  FoxyTunes users can set any of the songs on their hard drive as the song that they want to wake up to as long as the browser and computer is on while going to bed.

FoxyTunes is one of my most favorite plugins for IE and Firefox.  I use it everyday.  I definitely recommend getting it.

Yahoo! has acquired Israel-based FoxyTunes.  FoxyTunes is especially known for their toolbar that allows users to control their playlist from an Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox status bar in the browser.  Yahoo! also recently shutdown its premium music services and is redirecting customers to Rhapsody.

Yahoo! acquired FoxyTunes because the company shares a vision of “Universality and Openness.”  FoxyTunes will be expected to support other music players and additional music web sites.  FoxyTunes also has a Signatures feature that shows the track that is currently playing when signing emails or writing blog posts.

Alex and Vitaly Sirota started FoxyTunes a few years ago and raised seed capital to keep the project going.  The official acquisition announcement was made on the Yahoo! Music Blog and the FoxyTunes blog.

This announcement comes in the midst of Microsoft’s offer to acquire Yahoo! for close to $45 billion.    I first wrote about FoxyTunes in January 2007.

One essential tool that is needed for a computer is an alarm clock that plays an MP3.  As I searched around the web for a free MP3 alarm clock for the past several years, the best software I had found was Banshee Screamer Alarm.  Although it is not available anymore on the Internet, I still happen to have the set-up file.  One day, I attempted to have Banshee play an M4P file I downloaded from iTunes Music Library, then Banshee stopped working altogether.  FoxyTunes is the best alternative to Banshee.

And in case you were wondering, FoxyTunes isn’t just an alarm clock built-in to a browser.  The primary purpose of FoxyTunes is so that you don’t have to minimize your Internet browser to switch songs on your media player.  With the FoxyTunes toolbar, you can display the song title that is playing, control your media player functions including volume, and even move the toolbar anywhere in the browser.

The media players that FoxyTunes supports include Apollo, foobar, iTunes, J. River, JetAudio, MediaMonkey, MusicMatch, musikcube, Pandora, Quintessential, RealPlayer, Rhapsody, Sonique, The Core, Winamp, Windows Media Player, wxMusik, XBox Media Player, XMPlay, and Yahoo Music Engine.  I have a huge music library and find myself toggling between songs a lot.  Ultimately, this toolbar will help me save time substantially.

FoxyTunes was created by Alex Sirota.  FoxyTunes Planet is an upcoming service that will integrate FoxyTunes services with related music information from sources, Amazon and Wikipedia.

Here is a screen shot of the toolbar in action: